Vietnam’s call for China to release a captured fishing boat and nine crewmen points to Beijing’s contradictory policies on maritime disputes, analysts said yesterday ahead of key regional security talks.
Vietnamese foreign ministry officials on Tuesday met their counterparts from the Chinese embassy in Hanoi to demand the immediate and unconditional release of the vessel and its crew, the official Vietnam News Agency reported.
It said they were seized almost one month ago while fishing in the Paracels, an archipelago occupied by China but claimed by Vietnam.
The case illustrates “China’s double standard when it comes to this kind of issue,” said Ian Storey, a regional security analyst at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Singapore.
He said the seizure of “hundreds” of Vietnamese fishermen by Chinese vessels in recent years contrasts with Beijing’s response to the Sept. 8 arrest by Japan of a Chinese trawler captain. His boat collided with two Japanese patrol vessels near a disputed island chain in the East China Sea.
China issued threats and cut all high-level diplomatic contact with Tokyo. It sent two Chinese fisheries patrol boats to protect its fishermen near the islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyutai (釣魚台) in Taiwan and China.
Given China’s reaction to Japan, Vietnam’s call for the release of its vessel will “show the Chinese as inconsistent,” said Carl Thayer, a Vietnam specialist at The University of New South Wales in Australia.
Vietnam’s demand also ensures that the South China Sea sovereignty issue will be raised next week when ASEAN defense ministers hold their first-ever meeting with counterparts from the US, China and other regional powers, Thayer said.
“It will be raised,” he said.
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is constructing a new counter-stealth radar system on a disputed reef in the South China Sea that would significantly expand its surveillance capabilities in the region, satellite imagery suggests. Analysis by London-based think tank Chatham House suggests China is upgrading its outpost on Triton Island (Jhongjian Island, 中建島) on the southwest corner of the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), building what might be a launching point for an anti-ship missile battery and sophisticated radar system. “By constraining the US ability to operate stealth aircraft, and threaten stealth aircraft, these capabilities in the South China Sea send
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